Today’s Music Monday concerns one of my favourite lyrics of all time : “Kathy, I’m lost”, I said; Though I knew she was sleeping. I also thought a “New Jersey Turnpike” was a fish until recently. This draft post was originally written on the 14th of April 2021. I just got around to posting it. Wow, that was more than five years ago. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2026-10-19. Today’s Music Monday concerns one of my favourite lyrics of all time : “Kathy, I...

Before we begin, I’m thrilled to share that Astrolab is continuing to be a sponsor of my Moon Monday blog+newsletter for the third year in a row! 🌙 California-based Astrolab is developing large multi-purpose rovers called FLIP and FLEX for advanced exploration of our Moon this decade and next. The first FLIP rover is slated to fly on Astrobotic’s upcoming Griffin lunar lander . And NASA has selected a FLEX rover as one of its two Artemis crew-capable Lunar Terrain Vehicles, ...

So what to make of OpenAI and the future of Math? Here are some points I've either: thought of myself or heard from a human or read from an AI. Throughout this post I use the term AI to mean an AI system that produces mathematical results.  I decline to say  OpenAI or  Anthropic as generic terms since about 20 years ago I used  Intrade  as a generic term for Betting Markets---then Intrade went out of business.  I wish I had bet on that happening. Oh well. 1) Some of the proofs were L...

La Conquete, by Jose Clemente Orozco, via WikiArt . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at Icon’s fundraising, employment in China’s solar industry, grid-scale battery reliability, Tesla’s flying roadster, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items this week: I was on MTS Live talking about robots, p...

Over at Talk Python, we just launched Talk Python Membership . This is a community of Python developers, data scientists, and AI enthusiasts. It’s built around 4 pillars: monthly live tech meetups, a community, bonus episode summaries (coming soon), and no ads for the podcast. Please give it a look over at: talkpython.fm/community We have the first three tech talks already set up. You can see the full details at talkpython.fm/meetups : Talk Python in Production: Building Your Own In...

Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work according to an extremely simple logic: If you want to know what an AI model can do, devise a standardized test to gauge it. But AI benchmarks can also dominate the behavior of the entire field. In 1987, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s first benchmark on automatic speech-to-text… Source Benchmarks are the rulers of AI, in both senses of the word. As measuring sticks, they work accor...

When software meets hardware, engineering principles remain largely the same, but the sensible defaults often change. Kuldeep Singh describes our experience modernizing a large IoT fleet of battery-powered sensors. Our familiar principles remained important; what changed was how we applied them. These practices emerged through experiments, failures, and operational experience—each challenge helping us replace a reasonable assumption with a more sensible default. m...

Formlabs sent me a Form Studio 1 resin 3D printer to test after years of back-and-forth about their Form 4 printer. Like the Form 4, it's an SLA (stereolithography) printer, but unlike the Form 4 (which starts at $2,600), it's affordable for a hobbyist. It's not cheap , coming in at $699 (or $749 with a flex build platform, which I highly recommend), but it is affordable. I can't say as much about this printer as people who are well-versed in resin printing and use other SLA printers (all...

Terence Eden asking on Mastodon what people's setups look like. Here's mine - 38" ultrawide LG monitor that docks to my Framework 13, Fully standing desk, fish tank and motorbike helmets on the wall. I love my home office, but I do like heading into the office too. Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email , or leave a comment...

A flat sky Field of fog Hidden hills Echoes of snowfall — Not yet. A flat sky Field of fog Hidden hills Echoes of snowfall — Not yet. A flat sky Field of fog Hidden hills Echoes of snowfall — Not yet.

New in the SumatraPDF pre-release builds : Many new printing options The Advanced print dialog has new options, each with a matching -print-settings value: Print each page at its document page size ( paper=auto ) for documents with mixed page sizes ( #533 ) Choose paper source by document page size ( bin=auto ) ( #349 ) Center page horizontally on the paper ( center ) ( #348 ) Stretch pages to fill paper ( stretch ) ( #2220 ) Rotate printout ( rotate=90|1...

We sometimes need to convert binary data to text. For example, your emails must be stored as text files. Naïvely, you could just use a string of 0 and 1 , but it would mean using one character per bit. We can do better by using 64 ASCII characters: all letters, all numbers, plus a few extra characters. Base64 represents three bytes with four ASCII characters. Base64 is how email carries attachments, how certificates are stored, how images get embedded in web pages (data URLs), and how bina...

We’re down to the final four segments, but we only have three walks left to do. The plan for today is to walk segment number 7 and also attach to it the beginning part of number 8. 23km, 870m of ascent, 1250m of descent. Next time, we’ll finish 8th and attach 9th to it, but that’s a problem for future me. I’ll be honest with you, I’m kinda tired of these walks. Especially because this second half stretches across trails I walked countless times before. But I also want to walk the who...

Prasanna Vijayanathan , Renzo Sanchez-Silva When Jake Paul and Mike Tyson stepped into the ring in November 2024, we delivered the fight to roughly 65 million concurrent streams. On an ordinary day our infrastructure takes in more than 2 billion requests and handles upwards of 38 million real-time logging events every second. At that scale, the whole picture doesn’t fit into a single engineering team’s head or onto a single dashboard. With more Live content, Podcasts and real-time streams, ...

Kevin Kelly 's The Inevitable articulates a handful of macro technological trends and follows them to their logical conclusions. It's an insightful read -- I highly recommend it. One decade later, here are some AI-related excerpts from the book: "By 2026, Google’s main product will not be search but AI." "oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences" "The AI on the horizon looks more like Amazon Web Services" "The bulk of AI will be specia...

I am a habitual tab hoarder so I created a Firefox addon to help me manage every one of my very special browser tabs. Sort tabs by oldest, unload them, find duplicates, and consolidate tabs to a single window — buncha useful stuff in there! Download from Mozilla Addons Source code on GitHub Features Go directly to a tab by clicking on it. Shows Duplicate tabs (any tab opened more than once) A special section to show any tabs currently playing audio (video counts if no...

A recent Anthropic blog post contained a short paragraph, not at all the point of the post, which has been buzzing around my brain since I read it: A new level of operational excellence is possible. Our team uses Claude Tag heavily, which has helped us monitor each component of the system. For example, we created Slack channels where we tasked Claude with being obsessively focused on the health of a single component. We call these Claudes “superfans.” We have a scion-daemon superfan, a...

When designing software, the requirements you don’t have are as important as the requirements you do. Identifying what you can compromise on — what can be slow, or stale, or inflexible — is usually the key to an elegant design. Elegant systems drop some requirements For instance, take preforking web servers like Unicorn . Because they lack the feature of shared mutable state between server instances, they can run each server in its own process, which provides isolation for free. Becau...

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087, a chip that made floating-point operations much faster in the IBM PC and other systems. Although the 8087 supports advanced operations such as tangents, square roots, and logarithms, this article focuses on basic arithmetic operations: addition and subtraction. The 8087 provided a spectacular speed improvement over the 8086 processor, speeding up addition by a factor of almost 100, and complicated operations by even more. 1 In this article, I examine the 8087...

One of the most wonderful aspects of math is how deep we can get by studying seemingly trivial questions. Consider the roots of unity, where "unity" simply means the number 1. Basics: roots of unity for real numbers Studying the roots of unity usually begins in middle school: what is the square root of 1? Equivalently, what are the solutions to this equation? \[x^2=1\] Well, there are two answers: 1 and -1. Similarly, we can ask the question for higher roots; the third roots are solu...

It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Golden Gate Bridge . It’s been a few years since Current (and before that, Kafka Summit) was in San Francisco, but here we are—on November 4 & 5 we’ll be there, and I’m excited to continue a tradition that started back in 2019 with a run over the Gold...

As an island nation, maritime awareness is essential to Taiwan’s national security. Its coastline stretches more than 1,500 kilometers across the main island and outlying islands, so keeping watch over the surrounding waters requires vessels, sensors, and operators spread over a wide area. Autonomous unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) can extend surveillance, but adding more USVs also means operators spend more time telling each vessel what to do.   Hivemind is Shield AI’s mission autonomy ...

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